She checks her phone, flicking off Airplane Mode. Amber Heath has texted to say she is running five minutes late to meet her.

Chapter 29

Becky kills time, sitting on the steps of a shopping arcade near the cinema, with a cup of coffee, hiding behind her sunglasses.

She watches as a rowdy group of teenage girls, probably skiving off school, jostle over a phone screen, shrieking with laughter, giving each other endless grief for some slip of the emotions over a boy, a photo, a friend, just life. They are still at the beginning of so much. Becky tries not to nakedly stare at them. The sunglasses help.

The past year has been hard on her own sweet teenager.

When the news broke that Amber Heath’s longed-for witness had a name and face, Maisie had asked Becky the question, and Becky had told her, Yes, it was me.

‘You were there when it happened?’ Maisie said through her tears. ‘All that time you sat on your hands and didn’t say anything?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you defended him! You said what a good man he was!’

‘Yes.’

‘While everyone called Amber a liar for making up a witness?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mum, she fucking tried to kill herself!’

‘I know.’

‘And you were there?’

‘I saw two people having sex and I left straight away. I didn’t really understand what I’d seen, other than Matthew on the floor with someone who wasn’t his wife.’

‘But she asked you to come forward.’

‘I know.’

‘And you didn’t. You lied and said it wasn’t you.’

‘I’ve told the police everything.’

‘When did you do that?’

‘A couple of days ago.’

‘But I don’t understand. Why didn’t you say something straight away?’

‘I wish I had.’

‘No, answer the fucking question! Why didn’t you say anything?’ And with that, Maisie had broken: the forensic questioning gone, and in its place an angry blizzard of accusations and condemnations. ‘What if it had been me? How would you have felt if someone put their fucking stupid career ahead of helping me out while I got raped on a floor somewhere?’

What could she say to save herself?

She might have said: listen. I might have had a different life, if Adam hadn’t raped me and then lied to me for sixteen years.

I might have been less frightened of losing the things I had.

She might have said: I spent sixteen years believing that I was lying to you when we told you Adam was your father. For most of that time, I blamed a man who turns out to be gay and kind and horrified that I thought that about him. I used to fantasize about killing him.

I might not have been so warped and wounded.

You might not have existed.

I ended up owing too much to two men.

Two men who knew exactly what they were doing with me.

And I lost everything.